Back Door Man #4

If you’re as ludicrous a person as I am, it can be tempting to mentally place oneself in a particular year “at age” and wonder how you might have responded at the time to rocknroll’s past, present and potential future. If I put myself in 1974, I’d probably want to respond a lot like Phast Phreddie Patterson and the Back Door Man crew did at the time. I’d want to be blathering to everyone who listened about The Stooges, Velvets and Roxy Music; I’d have a reverence for rockabilly and 60s garage rock; I’d know what “punk” was three years before 1977 told me what it was; and I’d be searching, grasping for anything that hinted at the musical future I wanted to will into existence. (If I’m really stretching the imaginary point, I’d be putting out a fanzine praising Les Razilles Denudes, current krautrock, crate-digging 60s punk 45s, Simply Saucer and whatnot).

To date, every fanzine I’ve talked about here has been something that I physically own an original copy of. Not Back Door Man #4. In the early 1990s my good friend JB was spending quality time at his local San Diego Kinko’s making ersatz photocopies of his classic fanzines for certain friends, of whom I was luckily one. I got a package once with multiple Back Door Mans, a Brain Damage and a gaggle of the Patti Smith fanzine Another Dimension, all stapled and assembled beautifully. Given that they were from the mid-70s, I could almost pretend that they were the real deal, in their original form. This Back Door Man came from that batch, and yet it’s “worth” plenty to me.

I hadn’t really looked at it in a long time, this “only 40¢” fanzine from Torrance, CA. They really were a crew of “hardcore rock’n’rollers” at BDM; they included within their ranks Patterson; co-editor DD Faye (whom I confused for years with her equally lovely sister Danielle, who was in The Zippers and Venus & The Razorblades), Don Waller and Thom Gardner. At this point, 1974, considered by many far & wide to be a true low point in rock music, they are grasping at anything rebellious and wild they can get their hands on that might hint at the abandon and rawness they need. Blue Oyster Cult, Aerosmith, Ron Ashton & Dennis Thompson’s new band New Order; Mott The Hoople, Nico, Patti Smith and John Cale – even the execrable Tubes get a big write-up by Lisa Fancher, who’d later go on to run Frontier Records. It’s what you did in 1974, and it makes me think that the search for musical redemption in the bins and on the radio was actually a far more fun and ultimately rewarding environment for rocknroll fandom than, say, 2023 is. There just weren’t many clubs in which to go see local bands, nor many local bands who weren’t playing covers in fern bars.

When there were, Back Door Man #4 is all over it. Phast Phreddie does a proto-scene report called “South Bay Rock’n’Roll” talking over local live shows with the reformed Blue Cheer, along with Shatterminx, Heavy Transport, Atomic Kid and The Ratz! The Imperial Dogs, who formed that year and featured Back Door Man’s Don Waller on vocals, are also duly raved about, as well they should be. There’s also a great piece about how flummoxed they all are by Lou Reed’s new Metal Machine Music but how they appreciate its rawness and its place in th culture as a big fuck-you nonetheless. 

The staff also writes in various places about having to rely on AM radio (KHJ) to get their musical kicks, again grasping, grasping…..they’re really excited about The Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz”, which they should be because that song rules (we also discussed it previously on this blog here). I’m assuming that FM rock Radio was already pumping that heavy-lidded dopesmoker AOR sound around that time that I remember from my precocious Sacramento childhood: Jethro Tull, Yes, Led Zeppelin and whatnot, and these guys and gals were instead looking for the proverbial teenage kicks. 

Anyway, there’s much, much more to be told in the Back Door Man saga here – but mostly elsewhere. I leave you with an interview that Scram fanzine did with Don Waller about the magazine; here’s a great RockWrit podcast interview with Phast Phreddie himself. Enjoy.